Nostalgia Trap

David Nasaw is a historian and writer whose recent work has produced a series of magisterial biographies of some of the most towering figures in American history ( William Randolph Hearst , Andrew Carnegie , and Joseph Kennedy ). He discusses his graduate years at Columbia University during the political chaos of the late 1960s, and how his "bottom up" approach to historical scholarship has evolve...

Justin Rogers-Cooper is a professor of English at  LaGuardia Community College , as well as one of the best friends I made while studying at the CUNY Graduate Center through the Bush and Obama years. Justin always impresses me with his uncanny ability to synthesize complicated historical and political ideas into an understandable, compelling, often disturbing super-narrative. Our conversation in t...

Frederik Logevall is a professor of history and one of the foremost American scholars of the Vietnam War. His most recent book,  Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam  won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize. We sat down at the American Historical Association's 2015 Annual Meeting and talked about French imperialism, LBJ's stubborn personality, the "handcuff" of domestic pol...

Liza Featherstone is a journalist and professor whose book  Selling Women Short: The Landmark Battle for Workers' Rights at Wal-Mart  covered one of the largest class-action lawsuits in American history. We had a great talk about growing up in an activist family, the weirdness of the "trigger warning" movement on college campuses, and how Wal-Mart became such a monstrously influential force in sha...

Owen Powell is a retired military police sergeant, former Marine, and Iraq combat veteran whose experiences in war have been chronicled in the New York Times , on NPR , and perhaps most prominently in Doonesbury artist Garry Trudeau's remarkable collection The Sandbox: Dispatches from Troops in Iraq and Afghanistan . In this conversation he tells me about growing up the child of a U.S. combat vete...

Minerva Ahumada is a professor of philosophy at LaGuardia Community College . In this episode, we talk about her youth in Mexico, her unexpected move to the United States, and how a Japanese version of "The Little Mermaid"  (with a radically different story than the U.S. version) helped reify her interest in narrative ethics, philosophy, feminism, and radical politics.

Doug Henwood's recent   Harper's cover story about Hillary Clinton  (the title: "Stop Hillary!") has ruffled the feathers of the Democratic Party establishment,   and I can only guess how much this pleases Doug. We had a great conversation about his brief early attraction to the ideas of William F. Buckley and Milton Friedman, how and why his politics moved to the left, and how   today's economic...

Moustafa Bayoumi is an associate professor of English at Brooklyn College and the author of How Does it Feel to Be a Problem? Being Young and Arab in America  (2009). In this conversation, we talk about his graduate years working with Edward Said; his development as a scholar of postcolonial literature and theory; his extraordinary article " Disco Inferno ," which chronicles the use of American po...

Will Menaker is an editor at Liveright Publishing , who recently put out Jacob Bacharach's debut novel, The Bend of the World . I've known Will since graduate school, where we shared a common love for The Onion ,  The Sopranos,  and the weird ideological currents flowing through American popular culture. In this episode, we talk about his socialist ancestors, who opened cooperative factories in th...

Although the popular stereotype of "kids these days" has them staring apathetically at their phones, more concerned with selfies than politics, my experiences with young people at CUNY often give the lie to that idea. After a semester spent reading and writing about climate change, the students in Justin Rogers-Cooper 's English 101 course at LaGuardia Community College  were heavily engaged, and...

Claudia Moreno Parsons is a professor of English at LaGuardia Community College , and also the wife of your humble host. Since I've spoken to so many guests about the different people that made an impact on their lives, I thought that, for the podcast's 30th episode, it would be appropriate to speak with someone who's had a profound impact on my  life. Claudia talks with me about her childhood in...

Currently a professor in the Economics department at John Jay College  in New York City, Josh Mason is one of only a few economists that I know in real life, so it was great to have the opportunity to pick his brain about details we historians often tend to overlook. We talked about his background in left journalism, his work with major labor unions, the direction of U.S. labor politics, and the c...

I've known English professor Neil Meyer for many years, since our time spent concurrently at the CUNY Graduate Center, which spanned more or less the entire Bush and early Obama eras. I never knew Neil was from Detroit before this conversation, and the discovery allowed us an entryway into a wide range of historical and political phenomenon. We talked about his work in early American literature, h...

My conversation with Jayashree Kamble, a writer and English professor at LaGuardia Community College , was an opportunity to talk about popular culture, an intense and rich subject of study that, at least in my experience, is often met with some resistance in graduate history departments. Jayashree discusses her early education in India, how she decided to move to Minnesota for graduate school, an...

Sarah Jaffe is a freelance writer and journalist whose work appears in The Guardian , In These Times , Salon , and Dissent Magazine , where she co-hosts the Belabored Podcast . We had a fun conversation about 90s culture, the paradox of loving the NFL, Beyoncé's feminist status, Ferguson's continued uprising, the state of higher education and, of course, the biographical details of how "punk rock...

Steve Brier is a historian whose work at the American Social History Project  helped draw me into the field of working class social history. Steve also has some amazing stories about his father's time fighting fascists on the streets of East London in the lead-up to World War II, his time spent at Berkeley in the middle of the Free Speech Movement  in 1964, and his work and friendship with legenda...

Sarah Leonard is an exciting voice in left journalism, currently working as a writer and editor for The Nation , New Inquiry , and Dissent . She writes about stuff that matters: mass incarceration, feminism, the evolution of media and technology, and much more. We talked about her experiences working around figures from the Democratic Party, her take on Occupy's past and future, and the limits of...

Frances Fox Piven  is a towering figure of the American Left, a professor of political science whose combined academic work and political activism provide an extraordinary framework of ideas about poverty, race, war, and many other vital issues. We sat down for a conversation about her upbringing during the Great Depression, the development of her political values, her friendship with Howard Zinn...

James Oakes was sitting at the head of a frighteningly tiny conference table when I entered the room for my first graduate course at the CUNY Graduate Center  many years ago. A professor of American history, his intensely thoughtful approach to the discipline impressed and, of course, intimidated me. I've since come to know him as a serious and generous scholar, whose work on slavery and abolition...

In recent months I have been depending on writer and professor Anthony Galluzzo's fantastic Facebook feed for his uniquely cynical take on the latest news, notes, and opinions--particularly when it comes to higher education, gentrification, militarized police, imperial foreign policy, and lots of other big issues facing the world today. I finally got to sit down with him, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn...

I 've known Joe and John Lombardo since the mid-1990s, when I met them while working at a restaurant called Marie Callender's  in Ventura, California. As an alienated, nerdy teenager, I looked up to the Lombardo brothers as models of a different kind of man than the jocks and surfers I was surrounded by   in high school. In hindsight, they were my first encounter with hipsterism, and they taught m...

Nichole Shippen is a political theorist and professor at LaGuardia Community College  in Queens, New York. We talked a bit about her youth in a small rancher town in Wyoming, and how she navigated the particular cultural landscape of such a space. Our discussion focuses mainly on race, identity, and class structure in America, as we try to situate events in Ferguson, Missouri within a wider politi...

David Zeiger's documentary film Sir! No Sir!   had a profound impact on my graduate studies, educating me about the "GI movement" against the Vietnam War and kick-starting my project on the "GI coffeehouses" that functioned as the institutional support network for that important movement. We had a great conversation about his years growing up in Los Angeles, his need to "do something" about the wa...

During my early years as a graduate student in history, I took a course at the CUNY Graduate Center  called "From Civil Rights to Black Power," taught by Professor Clarence Taylor. The readings for the course, along with Professor Taylor's radical approach to American racial politics, completely rearranged my perceptions about race and American society, and helped set me on a path to becoming a ra...

Reading Todd Gitlin's book The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage  was a major moment in my development as a historian. Gitlin's colorful, rigorous description of that turbulent decade heavily influenced my decision to study postwar American politics when I began my graduate studies in 2004. I recently sat down in his office at Columbia University to talk about his experience as president of Stu...